


Waltzing

by brownbot5k



Series: Pretty Girls with Good Manners [9]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Break Up Talk, Casual Sex, Dancing, Dom/sub, F/M, Kink Negotiation, Past Relationship(s), Relationship Negotiation, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:34:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28182495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brownbot5k/pseuds/brownbot5k
Summary: Bob hasn't danced, really danced, in a long time.  Grace hasn't danced at all.  What starts as impromptu lessons turns into a new understanding.  Bob can't stay, but Grace doesn't need him to.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Series: Pretty Girls with Good Manners [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2005243
Kudos: 4





	Waltzing

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry Hank294. Still working on the files for you, but I got this done first.

I was in trouble.

It was one thing to bed my closeted coworker in the wake of an awful day, or even to strike up a casual kinky friends-and-fucking arrangement with her. But this was getting out of hand; I couldn’t even keep my teeth in my mouth for a damn week. Grey was a PIN lifer and never did anything casually; I doubted she’d made an exception for me, especially if she was saying she loved me with that look on her face. Worse, in the moment, my reaction was pleased and possessive, not, “if I keep doing this, I’m going to get washed.”

I couldn’t stay here, in this Patriot Act job in this wasteland town. She had to know that; she was helping me prep for the move! But if she was bothered or worried, it didn’t show, and I didn’t want to rock the boat, so we kept going through my crap. Then we found the old photos.

“So this is where they went!” I cried. “I missed these…”

The one I’d found was a black and white shot, taken in high school, me and a kid in a letterman jacket. It was the only shot I had of him, and Su had only gotten it because she’d snuck up on us during lunch; I hadn’t known she was there so was caught in mid-conversation, while he was looking up with a surprised look, sandwich still in hand.

Grey pointed to the boy and looked at me questioningly.

“Arthur West,” I said. “Sweet kid. He was… I guess you could call him my first sweetheart.”

“In high school?”

“Well, more of a secret star-crossed romance. What about you, did you…?”

But she shook her head. “Just Vicki.”

Then she held out the photo frame she was holding. In it, my zitty college self waltzed with a tall girl. The fashion was terrible but the photo was good, catching us in the full sweep of motion.

“Oh, that old thing,” I said. “Su snapped that one too. It’s good, right? You’d never guess I was agonizing about my O-Chem project that day.”

“Didn’t know you danced.”

“Oh yeah, up through college. I think we won that one in the picture.”

She pointed to the girl and gave me an inquiring look.

I sighed and took the frame from her. “Linda Alagaratnam. Man, I haven’t thought about her in years…”

The sexual revolution missed my snotty private high school. Su and I were brown specks in a sea of Mayflower white; she dealt by becoming as quiet and normal as possible, but I had limp wrists and a big mouth, so my glasses spent a lot of time held together with tape.

One day, I was getting my ass kicked when I heard, “leave him alone.” The next thing I knew, someone was putting my glasses in my hand and asking if I was all right.

Arthur West was the kind of gorgeous golden athlete they put on propaganda posters. But his letterman jacket wasn’t from our school. He was a rarity, a mid-year transfer, so he had no idea what he’d just done.

I put my glasses back on and said, “you know I’m the class fag, right?”

He smiled and said, “So?”

Be still my beating heart.

Poor Su must’ve listened to a hundred variations of, “O my agony, how can I share my secret love?” Surely, I thought, there was no way someone so beautiful, so athletic, so clearly heterosexual—

Within three weeks I had him on his knees in the boy’s room.

I don’t even remember the details of how we got there, just that I was teasing him and made some joke about him getting down and worshiping me. Except then he went for it. Any fear that he was pranking me went out the window when I saw the way he looked up at me… and that he was hard. Blew my teenage fat-boy mind.

Turned out this big strapping Adonis had a thing for me pushing him around. So did I. We had a lot of fun stealing kisses and more all over campus, but it had to stay secret. He’d gotten kicked out of his last school for doing the same thing… and one day, he got caught again, kicked out again, and I never did find out what became of him.

Arthur was a protective puppy, so I managed to avoid all consequences, but I graduated bitter as hell, determined to smash down the closet door. And I did, the moment I made it to college. Discovered disco, started taking every drug offered to me, pretending I hadn’t been a smug atheist since the fifth grade so I could have orgies with guru-chasers who insisted on calling me (and mispronouncing) Babubhai.

I met Linda in 1973 at ballroom dance tryouts, and I’m pretty sure we got paired as a joke. Linda was four inches taller than me in socks, wore all black and a disaffected expression. Side by side, we looked like a geometry lesson, circle and line. We had only three things in common: being South Asian (though she was Sri Lankan), collegiate disdain for most of the human race, and we could both really dance. When we figured out that we were a dynamite team, we made it our mission in life to crush everyone who opposed us.

Grey’s voice jerked me back to the present. “You liked it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did for a while.” I put Arthur’s photo on the wall, but recycled the Linda one. “You dance?”

She shrugged. “Parents got me lessons for prom. Didn’t go well.”

“You didn’t like it?”

She glanced at me, then away. “Didn’t like leading.”

Oh. “And I’m guessing it wasn’t girls you wanted to be dancing with.”

“No.” Then, hesitant, “Would you? With me?”

I thought it over. “Sure, but we should do it at your place; you’ve got the stereo for it and I won’t trip you over a box.”

Her face lit up.

The next time we were at her apartment, we rearranged the living room furniture and dug through her LPs until I saw Strauss. “How’s a waltz for starters? That’s easy enough.”

“Won’t be good at it.”

“Don’t worry, my first job was giving lessons, and I was a good lead once.”

When we were ready and the arm of the record player came down with a crackle hiss, I stepped up to her, touched one hand to her back and took her other hand in mine. Her free hand dropped to my shoulder.

It’d been years, but my body still remembered its frame. Grey, though, she stiffened up. When I looked up, she swallowed.

“Okay?” I asked as the music started.

“Never thought I could do this,” she said. “Be the girl.”

I’d danced with Su, Linda, and innumerable other girls; I’d also danced with men, including one stolen slow-dance with Arthur in my room while “studying.” That Grey never had made me angry… and sad.

I got up on my toes to kiss her. “Dance with me, Grace.”

She softened and relaxed into it after that, and when the song ended, I said, “See? You did great.”

Grace was smiling—the big, open kind I’d first seen on Valentine’s Day, the kind that hit me in the chest. “Thank you,” she said. And when the next song kicked in: “More?”

“Sure.” And it became a regular thing after that, dancing after dinner.

For all her talk, Grey wasn’t terrible, once she loosened up. She’d never be competitor material, but that wasn’t what she was in it for. She was just enjoying dancing with me.

It took me a while to realize I was the one pulling back, focusing on the technicals and keeping her at arm’s length like I was giving her lessons. Grey noticed first, one evening when she tried to move in closer and I snapped, “dance space.”

She looked startled. I grimaced. We stopped dancing.

“What is it?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Just memories. It’s dumb.”

She turned off the stereo, pulled over a chair for me, and claimed a footrest for herself. She sat and looked at me expectantly.

There was no outwaiting Grace. I sighed and joined her.

“You remind me of Arthur. You’re sweet, protective in the same way.”

Arthur had been a big loving puppy. Even as dumb kids who didn’t know what we were doing, we hadn’t hurt each other. Linda, though…

“You remind me of Linda too,” I said. “She was trapped in a box like you, and I know she found it suffocating, like you. And here I was, a fey fat boy in paisley, just enough like her to make it really sting that I was living the life she’d been denied.”

Linda and I never slept together. She was holding out for a good Tamil boy, so instead we started nonsexually, psychologically kinking out together, without realizing we were doing it. Though she didn’t know it, Linda was the dommiest domme I’ve ever met; her looks could cut glass. And she didn’t want an Arthur; she wanted a fight. She brought out the overcompetitive, insecure dom in me. We couldn’t resist locking horns, fighting to top each other, the thrill of never quite succeeding.

Cosmic balance, I called it once while high. She just laughed at me.

“After I got off the hippie trip, I fucked enough all-American closet cases to form their own football team. I got off on making them roll over for me, being their dirty little secret. Call it a carry-over from high school.

“I was a shit, rubbed it in Linda’s face.” Taking smug pleasure in getting something heterosexual her wasn’t—couldn’t, as long as she was waiting for her good Tamil boy. “The best revenge she could get was refusing to hate-fuck me—and thank god she didn’t, we would’ve killed each other.

“Eventually, though, the inevitable happened and one of my dates caught gay panic. I still don’t like men tossing me around, thanks to him.”

It could’ve been worse; I’d been able to walk away from it after. It could’ve been better; the prior times my queer got smeared, I’d been able to go to Arthur or Su, not Linda. But sad as it was, she was my closest friend at the time. She knew my tastes, pegged me the moment she saw me, and finally, she got her chance to knock me off my high horse.

I still remembered her triumphant disgust: “That’s why you don’t fight nature.”

“You ask me, she was telling herself more than me,” I said. “I knew it even then. But it was still a shitty thing to say, and it worked. We’d been playing power games for years, but that’s when she won.” I chuckled. “You should’ve seen her face when she realized she’d done herself in. The fun was all in the fight, and now she’d ruined it. We threw everything into dance, the rest of junior year, trying to get the spark back, but it was too late.”

When times were good, we were gold-level asshats. But times were no longer good, and neither of us could admit it, because that would mean the game was over. So we just kept trying, and the extracurricular arms race took over so much of my life that I almost flunked my junior year, something I’d avoided even during my acid-and-orgies period. Hell, I lost weight.

Su had stood by me through my cannonball coming out, my short-lived attempt at hippie free love, all my smarter-than-thou sneering condescension, but now she took me aside and asked, “Do you even like this girl? Because she seems to hate you.”

I scoffed and blustered, but she was right. Without the thrill of combat, Linda and I were just smug, spiteful assholes sneering at each other. That was when I realized that it was time to tap out. At least my grades gave me the perfect excuse; Linda never found out the real reason. In a surge of last-minute coffee-swilling cramming, I squeaked through junior year, and since Linda was a year ahead of me, she graduated and moved to Florida to terrorize the retirees. The moment she was gone and the endorphins wore off, I crashed, quit the dance team and spent senior year with my nose in the books, gaining the weight back.

I reined it in after that, until I discovered erotic BBS around the time I first heard about AIDS. No chance of infection, arrest, or assault? No terrible music or bad booze? Easy escape from the rude, racist, and repulsive? The choice was a no-brainer.

Offline, back up north, I’d had a semi-regular play partner, a fellow switch named Mindy who was just as fat and relationship-averse as me. We’d shared scenes, laughs, and take-out. Anyone who knocks friendly convenience hasn’t tried it. But then the Smithson West job devoured more and more of my hours, until by the time I moved to Vago, we barely saw each other twice a year.

And now there was Grace. Grace, who bent like she was made for it and smiled like the summer sun and still said “thank you” every time she came. Who’d gone from a one-night impulse fling to months of this.

“Linda and I were bad for each other, and I never want to repeat that,” I said. “But now there’s you. And I… I like leading you. God, I like leading you.”

“I know,” Grey said.

“Yeah?”

She gave me a wry look and tugged open her collar, brushing her fingers over the chain of marks I’d left across her neck and shoulder.

I coughed. “Apparently I also like hickeying you like a drunken prom date.”

“Wasn’t complaining.”

“Heh.” I reached over to touch, and she leaned into it. “Careful. You keep encouraging me like that…”

“So?”

I pulled my hand out of her shirt. “You know I can’t stay, right? The only reason I haven’t left this place already is September 11th put some snarls in my exit strategy.”

“I know.”

“You said you loved me.”

“Yes.”

I waited, but apparently that was it. I spread my hands. “I can’t stay, Grace!”

“You don’t have to,” she said. “Or love me back.”

She went silent again, but the look on her face was the one that said she had something more to say, just knitting the words together was giving her trouble. I waited for her.

“Not… not trying to make you stay. It’s not like that,” she said. “World’s been small. You make it bigger.” She made a sound of exasperation, plucked at her hair. “Didn’t used to matter. There was nothing to want. Now there is.” She looked up, and her hazel eyes were fierce. “I want all of it. All of you. Because you’re here now, and one day you won’t be.”

It was the most words I’d ever gotten out of her at a time.

“That’s really how you want to do this?” I asked. “Just… go as deep in as we can, knowing it’s all going to end soon? Knowing it’ll hurt like hell?”

She nodded. “I’ll give you today.”

That’s what I always told her. I hadn’t realized she was taking it that seriously. And I decided hell, if she was brave enough to go into this with her eyes open, I might as well respect her enough to be honest. “Well, if you want all of me… I admit, I have been holding back the kink.” I looked at the marks on her neck and winced. “Trying, anyway. Would you want—”

“Yes.”

She’d never interrupted me before. It made me laugh. “Well then, all right. Have you done this before?”

Silence. Grey avoided my eyes, shifted uncomfortably.

I took off my glasses, cleaned the lenses. “I didn’t think so. Well, let’s extrapolate. What’d you like doing with the other men you’ve been with?”

Her look of discomfort deepened. “Haven’t been any.”

I froze. “Ever?”

“No.”

“Not even—”

She gave me an exasperated look.

I tried to pull myself together. It was weak—Grey, far as I could tell, only liked men—but I said, “the women, then?”

Her look of discomfort deepened. “Vicky.” Her high school girlfriend. And come to think of it, the only one I’d ever heard her mention…

I put my face in my hands. “Shit. Shit. I didn’t even buy you dinner first.”

“Bob…”

“Jesus, Grace, if I’d known, I would’ve given you something better than a grope session on your ugly couch!”

“No.” Grey’s tone was dry. “Wouldn’t have slept with me.”

I couldn’t argue that; it’d been a close call as it was.

She patted my hand. “It was good. You were good.”

“I could’ve done a lot better.”

“Don’t want your best. Just you.”

I remembered Arthur in that school bathroom all those years ago. That time had been fumbling and awkward. Perfect, in its own way.

I’d been worried that I was getting into another doomed-to-fail Linda situation. Grey was about as far from her in temperament as it was possible to get, but I hadn’t thought she’d be able to let go, or say no to me. But she’d said what she wanted, she’d interrupted me to say it, and she’d clearly put more thought into it than I had. Maybe she was the smarter one.

“Tell me three things you won’t do,” I said.

She cocked her head, frowned.

“Humor me. No matter how much I want to do them. Three things.”

She thought about it. “Won’t be a man. Won’t use my work gear. Won’t…” she hesitated. “Won’t top you.”

I paused. “Do you mean you won’t run the kinky activity, or do you mean you won’t fuck me in the ass?”

She turned pink. “Second one.”

Intriguing. I didn’t like men throwing me around, but Grace was female, and if she was interested—

“Why?” she asked.

“I just needed to know. It was important to me.” I put my glasses back on and clapped my hands. “You’ve convinced me, Grace. While I’m here, I’m all yours.”

She beamed. “Thank you.”

Such a polite girl. “You’re welcome. What would you like?”

Grey thought it over, then pulled out her car keys. “Bring your music over. Let’s dance.”

So we lugged my CDs over. She wouldn’t let me sort through them either, just stuck a big strip of packing tape across the racks to hold the discs in place, grabbed them wholesale, and shoved them in the backseat. Once they were in her apartment and parked next to her big boxes of records, we started looking through our respective collections. Grey had one of those fancy stereos that could be programmed in advance, so we stacked on the discs. She let me go first, a geekwave song that not only had plenty of buffer time but a couple measures of tempo setting. It’d make for a short, sappy waltz, but that was okay, perfect even. I found the track, pressed play, came and joined her at the center of the room.

“Come here, I’m tired of dancing like a suspension bridge.”

She was even taller than me than Linda had been, but at least it wasn’t all legs, and her face when I pulled her close was gold.

“Dance with me, kinky girl,” I purred as the audience started chanting “love” to make the beat clearer.

Back in college, I’d tangoed with Linda, but we’d been competing, focused on perfection—work, not play. It was a different ballgame dancing with Grey’s right hip inside and above mine, leading her through movement and pressure, feeling her bend and give to it while the band sang about human weakness and small cherished things. Grey’s stereo clicked over to the next one and we whirled and spun to beautiful ephemerality and airplanes over the sea. The more we danced, the more we clicked; Grey had no trouble reading me now, just followed, and oh, I had missed this.

We danced to opera and waltz and disco and pop. We danced fast and slow, apart and together, open and closed. I danced harder than I had since college, and Grey danced harder than she ever had in her life. We broke sweats, and our breaths got short, and I dipped her and kissed her, and we didn’t stop.

Nobody could stop us.


End file.
